SETTLEMENT ONLY PARTIAL SOLUTION.

Auckland Star, Volume LIX, Issue 289, 6 December 1928, Page 6

SETTLEMENT ONLY PARTIAL SOLUTION.

(To the Editor.)

While I can sympathise, but not agree, with your correspondent Mr. Arthur Cummings in his fear that we may have to "knock the next fellow on the head who attempts to invent some labour-saving device," I am also convinced that land settlement is only a partial solution of our unemployment problem. If, as Professors Fisher and Segar said at the recent meeting of the Economic Society, "the reason for fewer people upon the land was the increasing use of machinery" there are other ways of combating the difficulty. For instance, why not cut down the hours of labour per unit and employ more labourers? This, of course, would not appeal to the average' •'cockie," who bases and accepts his land prices and values upon the amount of free labour he and his family can muster. The New Zealand Land Settlement League is possibly deserving of some support in its effort to increase the number of occupied holdings, but its present proposals are only likely to involve new settlers in financial difficulties if produce prices fall. Cheap, organised and State-con-trolled transportation will do quite as mush towards land settlement as Uncle Moses. It would be advantageous to break in suitable small areas where there is some prospect of a settler's ultimate success, but it is far more likely that some of the on-coming graduates from agricultural colleges will acquire larger areas and employ labour. Then, again, we stall see that improved machinery will produce two leisured classes, one at the top (voluntary) and the other at the bottom (involuntary), and we shall wonder why unemployment persists in spite of all the money spent in makebelieve remedies. This problem of the distribution of productive processes will take a little deeper thinking than the Land Settlement League appears to have given it. Would it favour an agricultural labourers' union, I wonder? E. DAVIES.